Strange floating point behaviour



Am Fri, 17 Oct 2003 00:45:14 -0400 hat Stavros Macrakis 
<stavros.macrakis@verizon.net> geschrieben:

>> I have this work sheet (I teach at a high school):
>
> Great to see Maxima being used in a high school!

Thank you very much for your response.
I started using Maxima but now I am loosing my courage a bit as there seem 
to be serious obstacles.
I mean the following points:

1)  No modern GUI.
2)  Problem with carrying out calculations in floating point.
3)* Problem with plot2d: I do not know how I can scale graphics output,
     I do not know, how I can draw curves with x-scale and y-scale being
     equal (that is, in "isometric mode", what you get in Maple pressing
     the "1:1" button or in MuPad specifying "Scaling=Constraint").
4)* I do not know how to prettyprint a session with the graphics being
     embedded into the output (using the fonts size I prefer).
5)  I do not know how to draw points for example and how to plot several
     plots at once (you can do this in Maple and in MuPad). I do not know
     how to plot points, for example.

I could do without 1), 2) and 5) but I cannot do without 3)* and 4)*. So 
at this state of play, Maxima can be used at high school, but Maple or 
MuPad are definitely preferable if you have the money (which we hav e not).

-- 
JB